Robert Morales and Kyle Baker's 2004 graphic novel Truth: Red,
White, and Black incorporates the visual vocabularies of social realism
and a grotesque cartoon style in order to represent the devastating
experiences of African Americans during World War II. The book's
revisionist version of the Captain America mythology depicts a black
Captain, Isaiah Bradley, as not only the successful product of an
experiment with super-soldier serum but also a would-be savior of Jewish
concentration-camp inmates.The story both reveals the subversive
potential of the Captain America story and challenges the traditions in
which characters of color have been excluded from superheroic accounts
of American culture by invoking some of the many real-world histories
that shape accurate wartime accounts. Morales and Baker depict such
histories through moments of cultural crisis, when racial identities
visually oversignify the graphic boundaries that attempt to contain
them, highlighting the interracial foundation of contemporary American
literature.

At the end of Truth: Red, White, and Black, Robert Morales and Kyle
Baker's 2004 re-imagination of the Captain America mythos as a
story of cross-cultural negotiation, readers learn that the events of
this graphic novel have been narrated by Faith Bradley, wife of the
first governmentally created Cap--an African American man named Isaiah
Bradley. Faith tells the story to Steve Rogers, the white Captain
America who has worn the superhero's public face since the 1940s,
after his search for the true results of the wartime
"super-soldier" experiments leads him to the Bradleys'
Bronx apartment. To illustrate her points about the misrepresentation of
cultural history and identity, Faith introduces Rogers to her husband, a
genially smiling man who cannot speak since he suffered brain damage in
a military prison. Isaiah poses for a photograph with his super-heroic
double; the two Captains' clothing underscores the contrast between
their respective experiences and public images. Steve Rogers wears the
full Captain America costume, complete with a blue mask that covers his
face except for his mouth and nose, while Isaiah Bradley wears khaki
pants and a blue t-shirt, the ragged upper half of his costume draped
across his chest. He smiles broadly, his left hand clenched into a fist
that recalls 1960s Black Power salutes; his right arm is slung across
Rogers's shoulders, while the latter smiles from behind his mask,
his clenched right fist mirroring Bradley's. (Figure 1) Although
the white Cap's features are concealed by his costume, he embodies
a government-sanctioned notion of heroism, his legitimate ownership of
the red, white, and blue uniform accentuated by the visibly white skin
of his nose and mouth. Bradley, on the other hand, stands nearly half a
head taller than his companion and possesses obviously larger physical
features, which are emphasized by the dark skin of his hands, arms,
neck, and face. This distinctive racial trait severs his costume's
connotations from their official origins, suggesting that his blackness
both exceeds the boundaries that attempt to contain it and undermines
the ideological basis of American patriotism. While Steve Rogers
personifies familiar notions of the twentieth-century American
superhero, Isaiah Bradley exists as the frame's visual center
through the very unfamiliarity of his physical signifiers within
conventional narratives of superheroics. Here Morales and Baker argue
that the unacknowledged blackness underlying American mythologies will
inevitably resurface to challenge mainstream accounts of political
responsibility and cultural identity even as the public's willful
amnesia about white exploitation of black culture continues to obscure
historical truth.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Truth thus offers a new version of the great American hero that
Captain America traditionally has epitomized by telling Isaiah
Bradley's story. When experiments with super-soldier serum are
performed on his World War II platoon, several of his fellow soldiers
die before the correct dosage can be determined; however, he develops
into a grotesquely swollen column of muscle and is sent across enemy
lines alone to investigate one of Hitler's medical facilities. This
mission lays bare the comic's central concern with the ways in
which the histories of ethnic minorities suffer erasure in the service
of monolithic nationalism: Bradley fails in an unplanned attempt to
rescue a group of Jewish prisoners who are also the victims of medical
experimentation and is able to avoid execution by the Nazis because a
group of black Germans hide him until he can be reunited with a United
States military unit. Only Steve Rogers's visit to the Bradley home
reveals to readers--and, hence, the American public--that Isaiah was
secretly imprisoned for 17 years after his abortive mission and that the
black soldiers' families had been told that their loved ones had
died in combat. After finding a "skinny, dead white man" in
her husband's coffin,(1) Faith set out on her own mission to
uncover the truth. Though her efforts end only in her husband's
return home, rather than a public condemnation of the government's
experiments, she completes one of the tasks that Isaiah could not by
rescuing him. Phillip Lamarr Cunningham points out that black
superheroes manifest a somewhat paradoxical mixture of physical
vulnerability and social insight; their storylines "address social
issues that ... primarily white, nigh invulnerable superheroes could
not" (2010, 54). Perhaps more troublingly, such characters of color
do not usually possess both physical and intellectual fortitude, a
comics convention that restricts the spectrum of powers otherwise
available to superheroes (Cunningham 2010, 56). Because of Isaiah's
now limited mental capacities, Faith must add her intellectual resources
to the cross-cultural truth-seeking mission that he began.

Jason Dittmer has suggested that the Captain America character that
Marvel Comics first introduced in Captain America 1 in 1941, on the eve
of the United States' entry into World War II, consistently
"proved useful in constructing an image of America as devoted to
individual freedom and equality of opportunity" (2007, 41). Though
Isaiah Bradley's experiences in Ruth complicate this perspective on
the superhero's social function, the 1941 Captain America assumed
the role of patriotic savior that Superman was already playing to
widespread acclaim for DC Comics. He would never achieve the same degree
of international popularity as Superman, but Cap served as a barometer
of the American cultural and political climate for the next sixty years.
Prompted by what Marvel framed as a socially appropriate desire to serve
his country, he volunteered to test an experimental serum that endowed
him with super-heroic strength and proclaimed his allegiance to the
government that had created him through his red-white-and-blue costume.
However, like many other second-tier superheroes of the period, Captain
America was retired in the late 1940s, and, apart from a three-issue run
in 1954, he did not resurface again until 1964. In 1964, he became a
part of The Avengers; in 1974, he gave up his highly visible costume and
heroic persona to become the Nomad, an anonymous hero who fought
corruption without allegiance to or affiliation with any official
organization: the most distinctive change that writers introduced in the
Captain America concept. Finally, in 1975, he rejoined the mainstream
Marvel universe in order to critique the corrupt system that the
American government had come to represent after the Nixon presidency. As
Richard Reynolds points out, such retcon strategies, (2) common to
superhero comics, tend to "divorce the superheroes' lives from
their historical context" (1992, 44). However, in Captain
America's case, each of his reappearances in fact signals a moment
of crisis in American culture whose resolution demands a special
intervention.

These reappearances enable writers, sensitive to shifts in
political sentiment among their readers, to articulate and explore
critiques of populist, government-sponsored patriotism--a strategy that
prepares the ground for the revisionist approach that Morales and Baker
employ in Truth. In 1954, for instance, when his series was briefly
revived, Cap received a new honorific on the cover: "Captain
America ... Commie Smasher."Though this job title was intended to
resonate with the US's concurrent "red scare" climate,
the 1954 creation of the Comics Code Authority, a self-regulating arm of
the Comics Magazine Association of America, signaled a temporary end to
comics' political statements (Duncan and Smith 2009, 44-45).
Captain America's next incarnation in the 1960s retained memories
of his work in World War II, yet sought to reconcile his patriotic past
with the sympathy he felt for anti-war protesters.(3) In 1973, he worked
to uncover the basis of a so-called "Secret Empire" weakening
American democracy; his discovery that the American president governed
this organization prompted him to give up his Captain America identity
and pursue a 1974-1975 stint as the Nomad. This period coincided with
the end of the Vietnam War and subsequent cultural rifts over anti-war
protests, veterans' difficult reintegration, and the Watergate
scandal.

Captain America next appeared in a storyline inspired by a
cross-cultural solidarity that not only recalls mid-century civil-rights
movements but also anticipates Truth's challenges to mainstream
historiography. The character who persuades Cap to reassume the mantle
of heroism is the Falcon, Marvel's first African-American
superhero, who would become his partner and share space on comics'
covers with him, even if he did not become part of the comic's
official title (Duncan and Smith 2009, 59). Originally a street
criminal, the Falcon, otherwise known as Sam Wilson, is a social worker
"who endorses a liberal civil rights agenda but rejects black
separatism" (Wright 2001, 237). Jeffrey A. Brown suggests that some
readers understood the "often unequal relationship" between
Captain America and the Falcon as "an unintended metaphor for the
black experience in white America" (2001, 20). Their partnership
began in a moment marked by the decline of the mid-twentieth-century
American counterculture, including the Black Power and Black Arts
movements. Jason Dittmer notes that such comics often associated fascism
with racism, equating Americans opposing racial equality to Nazis (2007,
45), though the assumed "real Americanism, which is multicultural
and devoid of prejudice" (47), represents an unachievable fantasy.
More significantly, the Falcon's critiques linked non-white comics
characters to the expression of deliberately anti-government sentiments.
Mike S. DuBose describes Cap's subsequent 1980s belief-system as
the notion that "true hero-ship did not occur without defining
oneself as an entity separate from the powers that be and transcending
traditional notions of law, order, and justice" (2007, 916). His
new desire to express opinions critical of the US government indicated
that he now understood "morality as being largely relative and that
being a dissenter does not itself make someone anti-American"
(928). As critical of Reagan-era conservatism as this formulation might
be, however, it still fails to address the issues of racial tensions,
ethnic identities, and social justice that the Falcon's
interventions raised.

Morales and Baker tackle just these sorts of issues in Truth, whose
version of the Captain America origin story derives from the experiments
with untreated syphilis that the US Department of Health conducted on
African-American volunteers from Tuskegee, Alabama, between 1932 and
1972.(4) Although Bradley and his fellow soldiers suffer much more
violent effects in the short-term than did the Tuskegee participants,
many of them also died as a result of complications from an untreated
illness, outside the scope of public awareness. Morales and Baker depict
the period of Bradley's transformation into Captain America as a
moment of cultural crisis akin to those motivating the white Cap's
many new personae across the century. In an interview, Mel Alonso, lead
editor of Truth, notes that invoking a character as established within
the canon of American comics as Captain America allowed the creators to
"tell a larger story, a chapter of American history" since
this familiar figure could function "as a metaphor for America
itself" (qtd. in Carpenter 2005, 54). However, the anti-canonical
status of Isaiah Bradley's Cap forestalls widespread recognition of
his role as a marker for cultural change; because his experiences
uncover the complexly racialized roots ofAmerican civil and
international conflict, his history represents exactly the kind of truth
that the mainstream is so anxious to conceal. As Rebecca Wanzo points
out, Bradley remains a loyal proponent of American militancy throughout
the war, yet his life as a black man in the early decades of the
twentieth century necessarily gives him "an African American
patriotic identity founded on an investment in democratic principles
promised by the state and mourning at the impossibility of having full
access to the rights guaranteed by the state or the mythology of the
American Dream" (2009, 341). Thus, although Faith, Isaiah's
narrator and ideological representative, clearly loses faith in the
country that was meant to protect her husband, their story retains an
awareness of "the American Dream ideal," which remains
"the ultimate ideal for which 'Cap' is fighting"
(Wanzo 2009, 347). This recurrent sense of a civil contract or promise,
always just out of reach yet never fully withdrawn, motivates
Truth's characters to uphold the principles that the first
historical Cap espoused, in spite of the personally and culturally
traumatic outcomes of their efforts.

Morales and Baker's creation of Isaiah Bradley, the black
Captain America, signals their book's intention of making visually
explicit the moments of crisis in twentieth-century American culture
that grow out of white exploitation and denial of black citizenship.
Michael A. Chaney argues that "characters in works by black graphic
novelists inhabit a world whose texts consistently reference the unseen,
that zone of consciousness, particularity, and difference from
stereotype which the visible world of the text masks or reveals only
partially" (2007, 179). Truth's creators reveal the
perceptible reality of this "zone" to their readers' eyes
by examining the interactions between cultural groups in which a
minority population's visible signifiers of identity exceed the
normative bounds of representation, threatening mainstream narratives of
closure, containment, and assimilation. The dominant group so threatened
responds by attempting to cut off the possibility of representation
altogether, yet Truth returns again and again to the undeniable fact of
"a sometimes allegorical, sometimes metaphorical, but always choked
representation of an Africanist presence"--a feature that Toni
Morrison identifies as central to the entire canon of American
literature (1993, 17). Each moment of cultural crisis, when racial,
ethnic, and cultural identities overwhelm the graphic boundaries that
attempt to contain them, draws the reader's attention to the
interracial foundation of contemporary American literature and the
historical contexts that shape it. Morales and Baker illustrate the
uncontainable nature of black presences in and contributions to one such
historical moment, World War II, when African-American and Jewish
experiences collided through joint struggles to exist within a national
context that rejected perceived cultural difference. Catherine
Rottenberg suggests that juxtaposed literary analyses of these two
groups point to the ways in which "Americanness might come to
signify differently in the future"--indeed, that "there are
always many possible, socially sanctioned, and thus normative ways of
performing Americanness" (2008, 15; original italics).

Morales and Baker put forward several such approaches to national
identity by highlighting the racial conflicts endemic to both 1940s
Germany and twentieth-century America through the visual language
specific to the graphic novel. Key elements of their book's style
include a grotesque cartoon realism that relies upon "in-your-face
distortions" as well as "slightly off-kilter line and shadow,
hinting at something rotting beneath their ... surfaces" (Wolk
2007, 54) and social-realist traits that originate in 1930s artistic
discourse. The book's arguments about racial identity also resonate
in visual symbols varied through repetitions; images whose meanings
gesture beyond the limits of their physical containment on the page;
contrasting juxtapositions between "cartoony styles" and
"adult themes and subject matter" (McCloud 1993, 56);
philosophical and ideological conclusions that occur across the physical
gap of the gutters between individual frames (67); and drawn lines that
gradually evolve into a new kind of symbolic language (130). This
graphic language helps the book's creators to interrogate visually
American efforts to erase ethnic difference through the rationalization
of national identity, a problem compounded within the hospitals and
camps of Hitler's Germany. Morales and Baker evolve additional
compositional strategies that suggest, however, that pre-existing
graphic languages cannot accommodate the real effects of such erasure;
rather, they incorporate the visual vocabularies of both social realism
and more traditional grotesque cartoon styles in order more accurately
to represent the devastating experiences of African Americans during
World War II. Their critiques of the American wartime trauma that was
complicated by domestic prejudice enable them to incorporate commentary
on Jewish negotiations of national identity politics as well. Isaiah
Bradley's experiences as the successful product of an experiment
with super-soldier serum and as a would-be savior of Jewish
concentration-camp inmates reveal the subversive potential of the
Captain America story, challenging the traditions in which characters of
color have been excluded from superheroic accounts of American history.

Social Realism and African-American History

Truth's unique combination of artistic styles and visual
elements encourages readers to examine critically the histories that
require such complex illustration.The splash pages and cover art
included in the book, which comprises issues 1-7 of the serial comic,
point to aesthetic roots in the social-realist art of the 1930s and
1940s, which helped to shape the careers of popular African-American
artists like Hale Woodruff and Charles White. Though Matthew Baigell
identifies "sympathetic humanitarianism" and "a
democratic art integrated with the lives of ordinary citizens" as
key elements of American social realism's idealistic perspective,
he also notes that the movement's artists drew their subjects from
the harsh realities of everyday life in the Great Depression (1974, 58).
Workers were often depicted in paintings and drawings as "sad,
drab, and spiritually depressed individuals" (Baigell 1974, 59).
Examples of social-realist art in Truth, which usually position
African-American soldiers in some kind of physical torment against a
background defined by familiar symbols of US patriotism, communicate
dissatisfaction with contemporary inequalities by incorporating sharp
angles, solid colors without transitions or shading, silhouettes, and
symbolic representations of easily interpretable actions. These visual
elements recall the fact that many young social realists of the 1930s
and 1940s worked with graphic-arts forms like lithographs, linocuts, and
woodblock prints (Morgan 2004, 16). Several artists and art critics
promoted such forms during this period since media like cartoons,
banners, posters, and signs could reach a large audience and deliver a
clear message in a straightforward manner; they were also easy to
reproduce (109). Stacy Morgan argues, in fact, that political cartoons
employed "a visual language for depicting capitalists, workers, and
the often discordant relationship between these factions that would
prove influential to subsequent generations of ... social realist
graphic artists" (112). Morales and Baker's visual elements in
Truth are thus aligned with a longstanding tradition in African-American
graphic arts.

This approach also highlights a common criticism that American
social realists faced, that their desire to portray "typical
American experiences" could be interpreted as "dangerously
similar to the demand of Hitler for a pure German art based on pure
German experiences" (Baigell 1974, 59). In Truth, however,
social-realist images serve as a historically specific reminder of the
dangers inherent in unquestioned government propaganda. The cover
features a background of vertical red-and-white stripes, against which a
black man in silhouette looks to his right, a large white star
emblazoned across his chest. Morales and Baker recall this image in the
splash page that opens issue four of the volume, "The Cut,"
which depicts a heavily muscled male silhouette holding a white soldier,
in full color, above his head. The soldier is crying out in fear, while
the silhouetted man's mouth is open, baring his white teeth in an
angry snarl; the same flag-like stripes form the background. These
images position a racially marked soldier as both a symbol of and a
threat to American patriotism; the performance of his anger threatens to
disrupt the black lines of the panel that contains this scene, yet the
patriotic colors against which he appears both validate his potentially
transgressive actions and contain him in a tidy box. The social-realist
dimensions of the image intentionally limit the significations and
intentions accessible to viewers.

In scenes like this one, Truth illustrates the ambivalence that has
marked American interracial conflicts during times of war in particular.
Morales and Baker incorporate social-realist elements because, although
the style does not intrinsically espouse a particular political agenda,
it does articulate the needs of underrepresented social classes. Its
subjects emerge from portraits of working-class subjects and the
activities in which they engage, alongside critiques of unrealistic
mainstream propaganda. Specifically African American social-realist art
engages more identifiable political concerns because these form an
integral part of everyday black perception, signaling a desire to
"inspire a transformation of race and class consciousness,"
particularly in light of the racial inequalities that persisted in spite
of black soldiers' contributions in both world wars (Morgan 2004,
20, 35). One of Truth's portraits of Faith Bradley, for example,
features a starkly stylized image whose simple lines belie its
controversial subject. When she receives a letter informing her of
Isaiah's death, after several of his fellow soldiers have perished
in experiments, her eyes widen to show red pupils shaped like eagles;
these stylized birds resemble not only the US's national symbol but
also an image popularly associated with Hitler's Third Reich. While
the image undercuts simplistic notions of ingrained patriotism, it also
calls Faith's nationalist loyalties into question. Does she
acquiesce to the jingoistic propaganda meant to conceal the true nature
of Isaiah's death, its enforced presence transforming her very
ability to see the outside world? Or does she perceive no true
difference between American and German nationalisms, reading them
instead as two representations of the same ideal? The panel's
social-realist style deliberately offers few visual nuances that would
enable readers to distinguish among these possibilities.

Morales and Baker portray such symbolically ambiguous references to
nationalist ideologies as signs of repeated cultural calls for
nationalist unity in the face of threats from foreign invaders.
Arguments on behalf of such unity disregard the real effects of
pre-existing social prejudices on the populations, such as
African-American men, who will bear the physical burden of eradicating
that threat abroad. The panels in Truth that draw on social realism
enable its creators to underline the limited possibilities for combating
or avoiding such deliberate ignorance. One page of the novel's
"promotional art," for instance, portrays a heavily muscled
black man pulling an. American flag over one shoulder like a cape as he
frowns into a flame-yellow sky; a tattoo on his right bicep advocates
"Democracy: Double Victory At HomeAbroad."(5) (Figure 2) This
military hero, who wears a standard-issue army helmet and a chain mail
shirt and carries a silver, battle-scarred shield, foreshadows
readers' discovery of Isaiah Bradley's history--the
"true" Captain America, whose iconography cannot be accurately
represented in the usual red, white, and blue. The tattooed insignia he
bears on his skin also introduces the real-world history of black
troops' World War II struggle for victory over fascism abroad and
victory over racism at home, a notion that stands in contrast to the
other signs of military obedience that he wears. Sergeant Evans
articulates the novel's perspective on symbols like this
"Double Victory" slogan when one of his men shows him a
picture of it in The Negro American a few pages later, averring that
"symbols are well and good for noncombatants, but they're just
foolishness if you want to win on the battlefield." Though he
interprets the intended social meaning of the slogan, he also
understands that a picture cannot yet do the work that changes in social
prejudices, civil laws, and international relationships will. Here
Morales and Baker employ the stylistic techniques and narrative
strategies of social realism in order to underline the ways in which
nationalist sentiments serve to mask propaganda. Only a person who
possesses insight into the motivations behind American patriotism by
virtue of specific experiences of cultural discrimination can formulate
such an analysis of pervasive governmental manipulation.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

The cover of Truth's fifth issue, "The Math," which
invokes a similar sense of social critique, features a man's head,
painted entirely black save for the strings of white numbers that cover
his face in horizontal rows and curve to follow the contours of his
mouth and nose. The man's eyes contain red pupils that look out of
the frame to his left; his mouth is differentiated by two faint blue
lines, which stand in odd contrast to the solid red background behind
him. This field of red is interrupted only by an erratic stripe of white
at the far right of the panel that is dotted with what appear to be
drops of blood. The next page, the first page of the issue itself,
reproduces the same image, except that its background comprises a series
of wavy red-and-white stripes overlaid with three black stars. (Figure
3) This image poses a serious challenge to the familiar symbolism of the
American flag, suggesting, as in the novel's title, that accurate
historical representation would require the substitution of black stars
for blue-and-white ones. Its most significant visual resonance exists,
however, in its echo of the numbers tattooed on Jewish prisoners'
arms in the camps: the lines of numbers that stripe the head recall the
millions of prisoners systematically assembled, labeled, abused, and
murdered. The red pupils' gaze beyond the frame silently points to
American and German complicity in the horrors of the war, suggesting
that both black and Jewish gazes bring the weight of historical
responsibility to bear upon governments complicit in their
citizens' oppression.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

These images illustrate the ways in which 1930s social-realist
artists consolidated the terms of the movement, as black artists in
particular increasingly began to focus on "the role of the creative
artist as an agent of democratic consciousness raising and social
change." Examples of visual art and literature like these offered
commentary on pressing social issues, validated racial identity, and
made arguments on behalf of "interracial working-class coalition
building" (Morgan 2004, 2)--as do the comparisons that Morales and
Baker draw between African-American and Jewish wartime experiences. Eric
Sundquist underlines the central importance of this cross-cultural
relationship, characterizing it as "a critical measure not just of
their respective positions in American society but also of the changing
significance of 'race,' something whose meaning and even whose
existence can be debated, and racism, something whose meaning may be
debated but whose existence cannot be doubted" (2005, 13). Here
Morales and Baker's complex representations of black-Jewish
interactions help to mark out the ever-shifting range of American racial
attitudes during World. War II.

Shattered Identity, Shared Experience: Cultural Intersections

Tension and antagonism have often characterized the relationship
between American blacks and Jews in popular culture and the arts, even
as creators like Morales and Baker acknowledge the many correspondences
that exist between their experiences. In a discussion of the controversy
that greeted the publication of Toni Morrison's Beloved, for
example, Naomi Mandel notes that African-American history has sometimes
been granted greater cultural capital than Jewish history in recent
criticism because of blacks' non-representation in mainstream
American histories: "Unlike the Holocaust, where the presence of
documentation is overwhelming, it is the absence of such documentation
that contributes to the horror of slavery" (2002, 583; original
italics). Truth attempts in part to mend the expressive rift between the
two groups by framing their common experiences of silencing and
institutional mistreatment in the visual vocabularies of 1930s
social-realist art and a more traditional cartoon approach that filters
everyday realism through elements of the grotesque and caricature. These
two approaches, which blur the line between "high" and
"low" artistic styles, articulate some of the political
strategies that the two groups share; as Joseph Dorinson suggests, they
have both "assumed iron masks to cope with life's
exigencies" and "created a

formidable brand of protest humor" (1985, 165). Eric Sundquist
also argues that the Holocaust, a central historical context of Truth,
underlined for black Americans the very real physical dangers that Jews
have faced and demonstrated their need for equal compassion (2005, 6).
Repeatedly positioned as outsiders to the American mainstream, black and
Jewish artists have created specific performance techniques, including
self-parody and satire, that reinforce communal identity and
rhetorically defuse the tensions perpetrated by repressive groups
(Dorinson 1985, 184). In 'Ruth, social-realist images highlight
persistent social inequalities that impact both groups over time, while
Morales and Baker frame examples of individual experiences with racist
oppression through caricature and other grotesque physical
exaggerations. These two styles incorporate overt political argument
alongside the potential for subversive expression that comic caricature
holds.

Though "Blacks and Jews [have] share[d] a history of otherness
caricatured and defiled" (Newton 1999, 12), their joint history
does not guarantee solidarity, a truth that the novel explores. A
rhetorical, if not activist, solidarity existed between blacks and Jews
as early as 1915; the years between 1915 and 1935 in particular marked a
time when the two groups experienced regular persecution at the hands of
the Ku Klux Klan and struggled to combat discrimination (Goffrnan 2000,
14). This period falls just prior to the beginning of 'Ruth's
narrative, which illustrates some of the ways in which national identity
is alternately signified and oppositionally defined via the body. In the
book, moments of cultural crisis in which ethnic minorities share
experiences of trauma are often represented visually through bodily
markers of class and race. These markers help to define characters'
individuality and articulate the physical consequences of social
prejudice, demonstrating each group's attempts to "tell an
allegorical story about culture and nation" that includes that
story's material consequences (Newton 1999, 16). Even when
characters resist the push to acknowledge commonalities, the book's
images are inspired by collective experience.

Truth thus explores the advantages and drawbacks of cultural and
social affinities between African Americans and Jews from the
book's opening scenes, which introduce three of the main
characters: Isaiah Bradley enjoying his honeymoon with Faith at the
World's Fair in spite of a white barker's attempt to keep him
out of a dancing exhibition; the wealthy Maurice Canfield returning home
from an evening spent working to organize a stevedores' union; and
Sergeant Evans explaining to a friend with whom he is playing pool how
he lost his rank as captain. Each of these three scenes helps to set up
the book's intended revisions to the 1941 Captain America story by
considering the potential costs and advantages of anti-racist
solidarity. The Bradleys have chosen to attend the World's Fair
because it is "Negro Week"; Faith reminds her husband that W.
E. B. DuBois is speaking at the fair that day, hoping to dispel the
tension created when the barker, viscous drops of gray-tinged sweat
pouring down his bulbous nose, tells Isaiah that "the girls ...
don't like being looked at like they're animals," and,
hence, he cannot let him in. Canfield explains a cut on his face to his
mother as the result of the tussle that ensued when a group of white
dock workers were forced to listen to "a Negro and a Jew give them
counsel about their economic survival"; this struggle ended in a
declaration that "'I never heard brotherhood meant I had to
end my long day of toil consorting with kikes and jigs." Though
Canfield receives a beating for his trouble, his work points to
blacks' and Jews' long-term partnership in the
twentieth-century struggle for civil rights (Rogin 1996, 16). Sergeant
Evans explains to his friend Dallas Huxley, recently freed from prison,
that he no longer deserves the nickname "Black
Cap"--foreshadowing the title that one of his own men will earn in
a few months--because he was demoted after shoving an officer who called
a black man's life a "trifle."

Like Bradley's clenched fists and Maurice's cut face, the
scar on Evans's face illustrates the restrictive physical terms to
which these men's problems are reduced. He and the soldiers he
commands, united through their dark skin, will continue to be visually
differentiated from the white ranks of the military as they accumulate
scars, unnaturally distended muscles, and other signs of physical
exploitation. While the white barker embodies the first moment of such
caricature in the book, these men's bodies are represented through
grotesque cartoons that emphasize distinctive physical features,
reflecting mainstream perceptions of visible cultural identities as not
only different but also malformed. Jeffrey A. Brown argues that this
type of reductive perception, one of which Morales and Baker are
certainly aware, needs to give way to an "alternative depiction of
black masculinity bearing the attributes of both mind and body"
(1999, 38): a goal to which Truth's conclusion points. Crucial
narrative events also signal that Jews have been subject to similarly
lopsided social representations vis-a-vis the body.

Several prominent critics and historians of American racial
politics have noted the many material obstacles to solidarity that exist
between Jews and African Americans.(6) However, by positioning the bulk
of their story during World War II and by invoking the intersecting
contexts of the Holocaust, the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, and
early-twentieth-century American racial attitudes, Morales and Baker
establish a level ground on which to stage their narrative of
cross-cultural unity achieved through collective struggle. Without
engaging the complex implications of postwar social contexts in the US,
'Ruth depicts a key moment in which the physical traumas inflicted
on two groups demonstrate the pervasive threat of public prejudice.

Isaiah Bradley, whose country imposes the title of "Captain
America" on him, becomes the primary means by which Truth's
creators represent the common experiences of African Americans and Jews
under repressive wartime regimes. His first appearance in official
regalia, a splash page that occurs near the end of the fourth issue,
depicts him jumping from an airplane, his army-green parachute billowing
behind him, minus the usual blue, winged Captain America hat. Instead,
he wears sunglasses and holds one fist up in a gesture that more closely
resembles a Black Power salute than the traditional superhero assertion
of strength. The accompanying caption is spoken by an army officer who
realizes that they have lost control of the mission on which they sent
him: "we've escalated to a new level of deniability."
Though the statement directly refers to his foray into German territory,
it also applies to the visible cultural properties that Bradley
manifests and that his country attempts to erase. Here he chooses to
recast the traditional Captain America persona in terms of his cultural
identity, overlaying visual markers of black solidarity onto a symbol of
mainstream American patriotism. This complex nexus of conflicting visual
signifiers enables Bradley to read correctly the signs of common
experience between African Americans and Jews. Hence, he sets out to
bridge the gap between them, though those he intends to rescue from a
German concentration camp interpret his efforts as an intrusion into a
landscape not his own, his mission the product of misinformation about
the traits of its inhabitants. The ideological confusion and the
conflict between intent and effect in this scene illustrate what Rebecca
Wanzo has identified as Truth's creation of "double identities
that go beyond the classic superhero dual identity of ordinary and
supernatural man." Bradley and his fellow super-soldiers manifest
the effects of "particular kinds of black exceptionalism that mark
average men who suffer above-average trauma because of racism"
(2009, 349). Because he acts out of a history of discrimination and
inequality, he already possesses an exceptional knowledge of the
difficulties suffered by those he is bound to protect; the physical and
psychological experiences of trauma that he shares with the Jewish
prisoners he tries to save exceed the binary of everyday man vs.
superhero, producing a more complex third term for identity. This
excessive signification of a jointly cultural, political, and social
sense of self necessitates the excessive representation of visual
identity traits in Truth.

Both social-realist elements and grotesquely cartooned images help
to strengthen the links that Morales and Baker establish between the
book's Jewish and African-American characters through such
excessive representation. Beginning with the cover art for issue five,
"The Math:' the authors draw a series of unmistakable visual
connections between the experiences of the African American soldiers who
received super-soldier serum before they were sent overseas and the
experiences of the Jewish concentration-camp prisoners. The echoes of
social realism that the images summon up may allude, however subtly, to
the fact that many American social realists were Jewish (Baigell 1974,
61); their development of visual techniques that recall the fascistic
principles undergirding German social realism also produces a critique
of totalitarianism more generally, as in the critique of both American
and German racism that Figure 3 suggests. One of the first signs of
implied solidarity between African-American and Jewish experience in the
book, in contrast, is depicted in more conventional cartoon terms and
appears in the subplot focused on the reasons why the soldiers have
chosen to fight in the war. Neither group enters into wartime conflict
willingly; while the black soldiers are able to take some independent
actions, drawing on resources for self-definition and self-expression
that the Jewish prisoners cannot, they also find themselves constrained
by unforeseen circumstances. Canfield is given the choice to serve or to
go to prison for participating in anti-war protests, which the court
defines as "tantamount to sedition"; Sergeant Evans, holding a
gun to his temple, swaps his planned suicide for a shot of whiskey after
he hears someone on the street below his window announcing the Pearl
Harbor bombing. Both he and Canfield interpret military service as a
marginally better alternative to the grim paths they could otherwise
pursue. Once they are training at Mississippi's Camp Cathcart, one
of the other men, Larsen, brags that he enlisted because "I'm
looking to kill me some white mens!"--an opportunity that, as Evans
is quick to point out, is "a gift you only get from other white
men." Earlier in the story, in a frame that takes up half the page,
Evans aims his pool cue at the cue ball, an oversized, perfect white
globe, noting that "This is the only place I get to shove ol'
whitey around." Both of these scenes, in which black men articulate
a desire to invert American racial hierarchies, feature close-ups of a
single central object--a cue ball and a man's face--whose clearly
articulated lines not only acknowledge the images' roots in
traditional cartooning but also emphasize the centrality of their
statements to the book's larger critique of institutionalized
racism.

For these soldiers, as for their unjustly imprisoned Jewish
counterparts, the war grossly exaggerates the effects of an already
prejudicial social system. The contrasts that Truth's creators draw
between simple, undifferentiated shapes like the cue ball and the
detailed individuality of characters' faces and uniforms, both of
which regularly appear on the same page, point to the fluid boundary
between popular and high-culture artistic styles during the period of
World War II. Such contrasts help to illustrate the disjunction between
individuals' material experiences and the outwardly uniform nature
of the social world that tries to define them--just as the glare of the
oversized white ball diminishes the impact of the soldiers' unique
traits. Naomi Mandel suggests that the horrors of slavery and the
Holocaust--and the wars fought over these public tragedies--have
rendered the idea of memorialization nearly impossible; texts such as
Beloved function instead to "articulate[e] the paradox of absence
and presence, memory and forgetting, the unspeakable and speech"
(2002, 585). A text like Truth, which positions such events in their
historical moments without attempting to memorialize them, necessarily
incorporates descriptive techniques that surpass the conventional limits
of text.

While the visual elements of the graphic novel do not forestall the
inclusion of text-based narratives, the form can make visible a range of
perspectives on painful subjects that underline the inadequacy of
language. Tying an experience to a specific semantic interpretation can
introduce "the problem of language's complicity with
subjugation" and undermine the individuality of its subjects
(Mandel 2002, 590). Morales and Baker incorporate multiple visual styles
in order both to offer an alternative to textual fixity and to
approximate a fluidity that can more accurately represent the
complexities of individual experience. Scott McCloud has observed that
the lines drawn in comics evolve through associations with specific
emotions into symbols, creating a new kind of language that compensates
for the affective excess not reproducible in text (1993, 130-31).
Truth's depiction of Isaiah Bradley, dressed in his Captain America
costume during a mission to blow up a Nazi medical facility, illustrates
the limits language reaches when speakers confront events that
demonstrate overwhelming inhumanity. Here Bradley is overcome by the
same poison gas targeting the prisoners and collapses on the ground. The
green cloud of gas issuing into the chamber where he lies contains a
drifting jumble of yellow-tinted numbers; as he thinks about his
superiors' instructions to remember that he "cannot save
everybody" and should "just do the math," or realize the
impossibility of freeing the Jewish inmates, he begins to cough,
vomiting up a cluster of tiny gold bars that morph into Hebrew letters.
(Figure 4) Although he fails to save these prisoners, he establishes a
political commitment to them by first internalizing the markers of
identity that the Nazis seared into their skin and then
re-voicing--unavoidably bringing forth for public view and
absorption--the very texts that help to define Jewish culture. The
violence enacted against these prisoners diminishes when their language
is rejuvenated, effectively belying the assumption that such abuse would
cut off the possibility of discourse (Dawes 2002, 2). James Dawes
describes the attempt to "mime violence through language" as a
process of "approach[ing] it analogically like a painter attempting
to simulate the physical sensation of cold by using the color blue"
(7). Bradley himself possesses no words at this moment which can express
sufficiently what he sees; instead, he protests the violence of this war
by visibly materializing a text that belongs to another group entirely.

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

Bradley chooses to oppose both the German and the American
governments' manipulations of their citizens by consuming texts
that are implicitly forbidden; the images and text that portray this
choice demonstrate for readers how such actions endanger the material of
his body. The Holocaust, a defining moment in modern relations between
blacks and Jews in the US, also provides the context for Bradley's
realization that whites enforce unequal, oppressive relationships with
ethnic minorities worldwide. Morales and Baker argue, however, that
complete racial unity cannot be achieved unless people possess accurate
information about the historical maintenance of such oppression. As
Bradley runs into his designated combat zone in Schwarzebitte, Germany,
in October 1942, he appears as a black silhouette, only the stars and
stripes on his costume standing out in stark white relief. This image
positions the patriotic stars as instruments of control that repress his
cultural blackness, yet, upon recognizing the destructive nature of his
mission, he tries to rescue the prisoners instead of destroying them. In
turn, however, they decide to rise up against this latest violation of
their humanity: "Now they send this one to attack us for their
sport! Enough!" Bradley tries to reassure them, begging them to
heed his good intentions with a "Ladies, please!," but he
hears a click as the gas valves open and succumbs to the poisonous smoke
along with them, their naked bodies piled atop his costumed one in a
grotesque tangle. This confrontation makes tangible the historical
realignment of solidarity between African Americans and Jews during the
Holocaust; their entwined bodies visually signify Bradley's
willingness to not only share but also reveal the truth behind their
fate. He desires simply to rescue his fellow detainees, yet he is caught
in the same system that has already entrapped them and realizes he must
also give voice to the dissent they cannot.

As he lies at the bottom of the heap of bodies, he sees the numbers
on the prisoners' arms glowing and remembers his commander's
parting words: "Isaiah, you cannot save everybody." His
position as a representative of the US government, sent to carry out a
specific mission, complicates the empathy that exists between them
simply because his leaders have withheld the information that he needs
about the true nature of the situation, and the prisoners interpret his
presence only as another harbinger of violence. Yet he commits himself
to acting morally when he obtains the information that fills in the gaps
in his knowledge of the mission. Upon first reaching his mission target,
for instance, he runs inside a building holding two crates of dynamite
in his arms, only to realize that he has been sent to blow up a medical
facility that still contains living patients. With his leaders'
instructions still running through his mind--"Do not lose sight of
your objective ... Do not allow yourself to be distracted by whatever
you may see ... "--he gasps in horror at the sight of human heads
sitting in jars, naked bodies stacked on examination tables, and
deformed cadavers at various stages of dissection. He sobs as he lays
bundles of dynamite next to the bodies, thinking, "Do not consider
what we did to you, is what they didn't say. Think of the American
lives you will save." He acknowledges the Jewish lives that will
end here, as well as the abuses that he and the patients have suffered,
far away from their homes and families, rather than accepting the
uniform patriotism that his government tries to force upon him. Eric
Sundquist describes the nature of such confrontation and mutual
realization as a moment of being "called upon to see 'the
stranger that dwelleth with you' in a mirror image that made it at
once easy and hard to 'love him as thyself"' (2005, 4).
This knowledge comes at a steep price, however, as Bradley's newly
"cosmopolitan" understanding of world politics is inflected by
the presence of "dead bodies surrounding those with whom [he and
his men] should have a cultural or political link" (Wanzo 2009,
354). -Ruth repeatedly positions moments of political insight like this
one as conflicted and ambivalent, showing characters experiencing a key
moral revelation without possessing the ability to act upon it.

Read against the now familiar history of the concentration camps,
of which both the Allies and the German people claimed to have no
knowledge until the later months of the war, Bradley's moment of
revelation here suggests that not only Jews but also African Americans
have been subject to the moral indifference characteristic of
totalitarian ideologies. Paul Gilroy identifies one central concept that
historically has united these groups' experiences of conflict and
that implicitly underlies this scene: diaspora. A biblical term,
diaspora came to signify a geographically wide-ranging cultural
dislocation in the late nineteenth century, when modern Zionist thought
and the ideological roots of twentieth-century black nationalism
emerged. In literature, black and Jewish diasporic concerns manifest in
a common set of themes: "escape and suffering, tradition,
temporality, and the social organization of memory," as well as
dispersal and exile (Gilroy 1993, 205). Bradley's experiences
generate in him exactly these sensations of isolation and loss; such
feelings are magnified by the sight of amputated and deformed body
parts, which offer a grotesque parody of the terms of cultural diaspora.
African American and Jewish histories are already linked through
recurring patterns of flight and enforced migration; this scene
rearticulates for viewers the tragic consequences of diaspora, the
fragments of cultural identity that cannot be reassembled.

Living as Grotesque: The Graphic Dimensions of Cultural Trauma

Truth reinscribes the social phenomenon of diaspora with signs of
psychological and ideological trauma, rendering it a repository for
suffering and alienation rather than a source of positive cultural
identity. Stef Craps characterizes such culturally defined traumas as
"repetitive and cumulative," collectively experienced by
"society's disenfranchised" (2010, 55). Bradley witnesses
just such a nexus of communal trauma; the political implications of his
transformation into Captain America issue not from the US
government's manipulation of his DNA but from his choice to oppose
the terrible racial injustices in which the war is grounded. In a moment
that foreshadows his assumption of cultural responsibility for the
crimes committed against German Jews, Bradley finds, while reading a
Captain America comic book, that "this comic came out more'n a
year ago, but it pretty much got our whole story--It has Doc Reinstein,
the drug we got, and this Steve Rogers fella the brass is so high on.
... But this is happening now, right? Not last year." His discovery
highlights for readers the fluid, permeable nature of the comic-book
universe, in which creators regularly rewrite histories and background
stories in order to situate new storylines more convincingly in relation
to current events. At the same time, however, he calls for the
historical and political accountability that many governments have
withheld from their citizens. This bald contradiction between
Rogers's reported experiences and the soldiers' also serves as
a metaphor for the misrepresentation of Jewish experiences during World
War II--a history that cannot be ignored, even as leaders attempt to
bury or manipulate the truth. As Evans notes in response to
Bradley's bewilderment, "Comic books aren't real. This is
a war. And in a war, the Army decides everything is government
issue." The temporary Captain America still believes that human
life ought to serve as the basis for institutional decision-making, yet
Evans's experiences have taught him otherwise. James Dawes
hypothesizes that language and violence are interdependent in times of
war (2002, 14); the language that enforces violence produces trauma in
those compelled to listen to its justifications. Bradley finds that the
violence and repressive strategies practiced by those in charge of the
war he fights produce traumatic situations for him and the prisoners he
cannot free; such trauma dispels physical and ideological coherence in a
process that recalls the forceful separations of modern-day diaspora.

Although Morales and Baker often frame their critique of such
unilateral government interventions in a visual language that draws from
the vocabulary of 1930s social-realist art, they also highlight the
specific consequences of institutionalized racism through a more
conventional cartoon style that draws heavily on elements of the
grotesque. The two approaches share some compositional
strategies--overstated facial features, simple lines, and stark color
contrasts, for example--yet the former centers on broad patterns of
social injustice while the latter considers the traumatic fallout that
individuals experience. Truth examines the material consequences of
crimes committed against individual American soldiers through physical
exaggeration, stereotype, and satire, common elements of the grotesque.
These scenes portray the long-term consequences of collectively
inflicted trauma in personal terms, using a style that Baker himself
describes as 'loose sketchy drawings, a lot of action and a lot of
bright colors ... a very pop, poppy, pop art type of thing"'
(qtd. in Carpenter 2005, 57). James Dawes characterizes the grotesque as
a common framework through which writers can more accurately gesture
toward "the task of witnessing to the unbounded and
unprecedented," since such exaggerations illustrate the horrors of
lives that, in a period prior to the traumatic event, would be
unthinkable (2002, 157). When Larsen, the first soldier to survive the
experiment, returns to the bunkhouse, his fellow enlistees are visibly
shocked by his massive arms and a head that has swollen into a bizarre
diamond shape, results that they would not have been able to imagine and
thus cannot comfortably classify for him. Yet, Sergeant Evans observes
wryly, "since you're the first dogface to come back ... you
look great." Larsen's facial features are bunched together in
the middle of his face, the off-center placement of his mouth and the
dominance of his engorged muscles over any other distinguishing
characteristics clearly positioning him to one side of the brawn--brains
binary. Rebecca Wanzo points out that Baker received criticism for
employing a relatively simplistic drawing style to portray characters
like Larsen; however, he achieves an effective "contrast between
the tragic narrative and an aesthetics often used to depict
stereotypical images of black characters" (2009, 345). While
Larsen's physical transformation testifies to the monumental feat
he has achieved merely in remaining alive, it also demonstrates to his
friends the physical devastation they will suffer as a result of
governmental disregard for their rights as unique American citizens and
human beings.

Elements of the grotesque also underscore the horror implicit not
only in false public representations of soldiers' deaths but also
in the trauma that they suffer at the end of their lives. Large,
rectangular panels describing families' reactions to the news of
their sons' or husbands' deaths alternate in 'Ruth with
images of the soldiers themselves awaiting radical physical change.
After one soldier's body bursts in a spray of blood when his body
can no longer support the physiognomic effects of the super-soldier
drug, a series of families receive the news that their loved ones have
died in an explosion. The horizontal lines and rectangular shapes that
repeat in the tables, straps, walls, and mirrors of the panels depicting
the soldiers' experiences echo in the lines of Faith Bradley's
ironing board and kitchen sink, the Canfield family's coffee table,
a canopy stretched above Maurice Canfield's coffin, and the wooden
bar top at which a friend of Sergeant Evans's is tipsily toasting
him. While rectangular shapes occur in countless household objects and
everyday scenes, here they echo both the uniform regularity with which
the men were shipped off to the laboratories and the outlines of the
panels themselves, which are meant to contain this story neatly but
which emphasize instead the ways in which the two groups are cut off
from each other--and from the truth. The grotesque dimensions of these
scenes exist in their consciously inadequate representations of pain and
loss.

The central example of Morales and Baker's grotesque-inspired
approach to portraying personal trauma in Truth appears in two
interrogation scenes that expose the secrets underlying the war's
origins. Isaiah Bradley becomes a prisoner of war after his failed
rescue attempt, waking up to find himself tied to a chair with Hitler
leaning forward to greet him. His experiences in this role are
interspersed in the book with another interrogation scene, in which
former Lieutenant Merritt, a white officer from Camp Cathcart, talks to
Steve Rogers and an African American FBI agent about his actions during
the war and afterward. Merritt is now an inmate in California's
Lompoc Federal Prison, indicted on charges of "murdering a federal
agent, conspiracy to commit acts of domestic terrorism, gun-running,
money-laundering, racketeering, arson in the commission of hate crimes,
kidnapping, [and] selling ecstasy and methamphetamines to minors out of
[his] chain of comic shops:' Merritt contests only the last of
these charges, arguing that "I got the best stores in the Bay Area,
and I keep my babies pure!" Purity is exactly the issue in question
here, as Rogers reveals that Merritt betrayed the US government in favor
of the Aryan ideals that Hitler promoted. The full-page panel that
uncovers the issues at the heart of his interrogation portrays Merritt
sitting at the table with his hands crossed, only the lower half of his
face visible, while the FBI agent's darker-toned hand gestures
toward the photograph in the middle of the table: a room, presumably in
Merritt's house, that holds guns, a picture of Hitler, army
helmets, and Isaiah Bradley's tattered Captain America costume.
Merritt's hands, arranged in a single loose "V," both
point possessively toward the photograph and belie the promise of the
"Double V" campaign introduced earlier. The fact that both
men's bodies extend beyond the page suggests that purity itself is
not a concept that can be easily contained; Merritt, a character who
possesses no redeeming merit, implicitly contaminates the rest of the
comic's panels through his very presence, while the blackness that
the agent signifies also exceeds the boundaries that the medium would
seem to place upon it. One man thus represents utter moral corruption,
while the other embodies a cultural identity that the mainstream--here
represented by the government--cannot yet accommodate. Merritt's
unquestioning trust in the racial purity that he believes both Cap and
the Nazis value resulted in his own undoing; he bears the brunt of the
blame that his country also earned by expressing his racist ideals more
openly than the government did. He comes to epitomize domestic evil, in
contrast to Cap's representation of absolute justice.

Merritt's interrogation scene, in which he reveals that he
first volunteered for the army specifically in order to participate in
the super-soldier project, positions him as the book's central
example of grotesque realism. His ineradicable prejudice against African
Americans prompts him to condemn the government's decision to send
black super-soldiers out on missions as evidence that "no one
running the project cared what it meant to real Americans"; no one,
he argues, would really be willing to "put up with Captain
Americoon" (original italics). In the course of determining when
and how Merritt came to possess governmental property--namely, the
original Captain America costume--the FBI agent points out that the
costume did not belong to Steve Rogers but to Isaiah Bradley. This
revelation dispels the pretenses keeping Merritt's bigotry in check
so that, with every subsequent panel depicting the conversation,
Merritt's features grow larger, more distorted, and less
recognizable. His final lines--"Cap, please? One veteran to
another? Think you could sign this before you go?" (Figure
5)--which he delivers while holding up a copy of Captain America 1,
underline the gap between Bradley's unsought heroism and the
persistent racism of those he served. Here Merritt turns his
interrogation on its head to expose, however unwittingly, the racist
superstructure that enabled whites' ongoing exploitation of blacks
in America. His mouth turns up in a black leer interrupted only by a
single tooth; the few hairs sprouting from his head and the lumpy
texture of his bulbous nose and chin lend him a monstrous quality
enhanced by his expression of avidity. The striking contrast between his
nondescript prison uniform and the comic's portrait of a crisply
outfitted Cap on a battlefield suggests that he, like so many other
conservative white patriots, seeks a connection to the whiteness that he
believes Cap represents: a notion of superheroism that Morales and
Baker's depictions of cultural trauma have already discredited.
Here we can also perceive Rogers's emotional shift from tranquility
to outrage in his changes in position across the page's three
panels; he first faces Merritt, then turns his back when Merritt
addresses him, and finally disappears from the page entirely once
Merritt asks for his autograph.

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

Merritt's contradictory embodiment of racial purity and
physical grotesqueness illustrates the incongruous ideals motivating the
wartime trauma that all participants, rather than observers, suffer. In
one telling instance, Morales and Baker depict the military officers
involved in the super-soldier experiments dancing at a party--a group
that includes Dr. Reinstein, the same doctor who was in charge of these
experiments in the original Captain America series. Rather than
agonizing over the threat to basic human existence that Hitler
represents, the partygoers compare Reinstein's successes to those
of his "former cohort," the Nazis' Dr. Koch. The first
encounter between American and German troops is not the efficient,
easily concluded endeavor that this conversation would imply, however.
Morales and Baker portray the total chaos of hand-to-hand combat in a
two-page scene, uncontained within panels of any kind, in which black
soldiers aim guns, strangle German soldiers with their bare hands, and
run screaming with blood bursting from their skin. At least four Germans
lie dead on the right side of the frame, yet the overall scene centers
on the American soldiers' howls of anguish, which swell beyond the
boundaries of the page: one soldier's mouth stretches in a
cavernous black grimace that effaces the lower left-hand corner of the
image, while another man strangling his German opponent seems to suffer
the same agony he inflicts, his mouth stretched into a rictus identical
to his victim's. Though this scene highlights the most grotesque
visual elements of battle--blood, dismemberment, physical agony,
confusion--its detailed illustration of combat renders it one of the
book's most realistic scenes as well. In spite of their victory in
this fight, however, the men come to realize that they have been sent to
cut off their enemies' medical supplies, not their ammunition. This
act signifies a further escalation of the war's inhumanity,
compounding the atrocities the soldiers have already suffered with
knowledge of the trauma they have unwittingly forced upon others. In
Truth's grotesque representations of their common plight, these
soldiers discover--along with the book's readers--that humanist
concerns overshadow cultural and nationalist affiliations.

Truth concludes by arguing that a broadly conceived humanism can
help to overcome the collective trauma inflicted through cultural
prejudice and oppression. In his quest to uncover the story of the real
Captain America, Steve Rogers secures part of the story from Faith
Bradley; now a professor of comparative religion, she teaches him how to
identify not only accurate accounts of wartime events but also the
visual significance of the costumes through which people distinguish
themselves. During this conversation, she sits at a table across from
Rogers, himself in full costume, wearing a Burka so that only her eyes
are showing. Her question for Rogers, "Whatever made you think
Isaiah was dead?" (Figure 6), signifies that he--and, by extension,
the American mainstream--does not yet possess the interpretive tools
necessary to distinguish authentic versions of history. The dark outfit
that she wears strikes a somber note against the room's pink
curtains and Rogers's bright uniform; yet, more importantly, it
highlights the more current threat to white American patriotism that she
tacitly embodies. Her performance of Muslim identity both defies the
post-9/11 climate of religious conservatism and illustrates the strength
of a nonwhite ethnic presence that surpasses even the excessive
blackness of her husband's participation in the Captain America
role. Though her hand appears slender and delicate, holding the edge of
her saucer, she faces Rogers head-on, tilting her eyes up to meet his
gaze, while he sits sideways in his chair, his body faced away from
hers. His position signals not only a discomfort at accommodating his
physical bulk in a room unsuited to his proportions but also the uneasy
public negotiations that take place between white America and its
culturally marginalized groups.

[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]

After Faith and Rogers have been speaking for a few minutes, she
removes her head-covering, noting that, "given the climate towards
Islam, it unsettles people--but it de-emphasizes femininity and focuses
attention on what I say, or on what people choose to project onto me.
"Though the conversation also reveals that Isaiah Bradley was
arrested and imprisoned after the war for allegedly stealing Steve
Rogers's costume, its real significance lies in the power it
identifies in black American identities. Rather than seeking to repress
Faith's story about personal and social truth, Rogers acknowledges
the worth of her insights into governmental manipulation and the
diversity that the nation must embrace in, order to survive. Here, Truth
emphasizes that Bradley has been falsely accused of war crimes, rather
than given the accolades he deserves, and lost the life he might have
had as both a hero and a husband. The theft of these roles reminds
readers of the parallel costs that Jewish prisoners have been forced to
pay while, at the same time, the public disclosure of his story ensures
that a new generation will learn about the lives of black servicemen in
World War II. The book's visual presentation, through
period-specific social realism and the grotesque realism commonly used
in a range of comics, frames the story as both emerging from a
particular historical moment and engaging social concerns that span eras
of American history. Its images oversignify the texts that previously
represented this history, suggesting that it can be accurately
illustrated only at the intersections of the visual and the textual.

Morales and Baker work toward a more precise representation of this
history by exploring visually the moments of conflict and trauma that
both African Americans and Jews experienced during World War II. These
moments, marked by cultural properties that cannot be fully contained
within pre-existing historical narratives, illustrate the complex
relationships that characterize a world in flux, ultimately forming an
argument on behalf of the cross-cultural solidarity that Rogers
recognizes at the end of Truth. Here Faith concludes his education in
the misrepresentations of history by introducing him to her grandson,
the provocatively named Litigious, who is reading a long-out-of-print
novel by young adult writer Daniel Pinkwater entitled Wingman. Faith
describes it as a narrative "about a Chinese-American boy who loves
comic books and dreams about a Chinese super hero." While Litigious
clearly adores his grandfather, he also looks outside both the
mainstream and his own life for heroes to whose examples he can aspire.
In this scene, Morales and Baker prove that an iconic superhero like
Captain America--whose once unquestioned patriotism has been undermined
by historical revisionism, disillusionment, and death--can no longer
satisfy American desires for a cultural hero on his own. Cap needs the
support of a broader network of social and political models in order to
promote a modern vision of heroism. Rebecca Wanzo characterizes this
newly imagined superhero as "a culturally conscious and conflicted
African American Captain America [who] can function as a dissenting
patriot but still remain in a patriotic tradition" (2009, 346). He
is able to support such a seeming contradiction because, as Morales
himself asserts, "'Cap is a propaganda symbol"' or
even a fetish onto which fans project their own desires and beliefs
(qtd. in Wanzo 2009, 358).At the same time, however, Bradley's own
grandson points to the possibility of a limitless range of superhero
identities. Because every cultural group outside the mainstream
possesses histories that have been repressed, Captain America provides
just one approach to replenishing truths depleted through
misrepresentation. Those who have shared in cultural trauma have a
responsibility to find the tools--in the form of political solidarity,
revisionist histories, and ethnically specific vocabularies--with which
to signify their experiences.

Ultimately, Faith Bradley's conversation with Steve Rogers
argues on behalf of the importance of reclaiming lost histories--and,
through them, unrepresented lives. Captain America died in 2007, three
years after the publication of Truth: Red, White, and Black. In one of
the most widely read and debated narrative arcs in Marvel's
history, Steve Rogers finally agrees after a prolonged struggle to
submit his personal information to the government under the Superhuman
Registration Act. As he walks up the steps of Manhattan's Federal
Courthouse, he is assassinated by long-time arch villain Crossbones and
dies as former girlfriend and S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Sharon Carter looks on.
Though, in keeping with comics' diehard commitment to retcon, his
character is soon resurrected, his death reveals two essential truths
that have forever changed readers' perception of Captain America.
At the moment of his death, his body reverts back to its original,
genetically unmodified form, leaving him a skeletal old man lying
vulnerable on a table; the super abilities that readers and his fellow
Marvel characters interpreted as the result of a permanent
transformation do not in fact belong to him. At the same time in another
part of town, his former partner, the Falcon, returns after the funeral
to an underground hideout where a group of unregistered superheroes
raise their glasses to Steve Rogers, someone they still recognize as
"the best of us" (Brubaker et al 2008, n. p). However, the
Falcon cannot stay for the commemoration; rather, he must join Carter
and the Winter Soldier in a quest to find Rogers's killer since
history will preserve the memory of Cap's heroism only if injustice
is avenged. No hero's past narrative exists as an indestructible
monument to his acts; rather, he can remain an active part of the mythos
only if the story moves on beyond him in the course of conveying a
greater history. So, too, Isaiah Bradley's story contributes to the
larger narrative of American conflict and heroism, providing the next
chapter in a history whose moments of crisis and triumph will exceed
imaginable limits.

Notes

(1) Truth has no page numbers.

(2) "Retcon" is a popular abbreviation of the phrase
"retroactive continuity," in which later storylines rewrite
the history given in an earlier story.

(3) When readers wrote in to suggest that Captain America ought to
go to Vietnam to support the American troops there, Marvel writers,
including Stan Lee, decided that he should stay at home--but allowed an
active debate over current politics to continue unchecked in the letters
to the editor (Wright 215, 244). Jason Dittmer labels this period in the
hero's history "a new narration of America itself" that
attempts to "[blot] out the stain ... of the McCarthy hearings and
other aspects of American history" (42).

(4) The study included 399 African American men infected with
syphilis and 201 disease-free volunteers used as controls. Since the
study focused on the disease's effects and evolution in a specific
racial population, the subjects were chosen for the stage to which their
disease had progressed--preferably the late, or tertiary, stage--and
remained largely untreated (Jones 1993, 1-2). Though American medicine
had already identified the bacteria that caused the disease as well as
its symptoms and complications, the United States Public Health Service
doctors participating in the Tuskegee study sought to observe the full
range of its development. They offered free medical care, hot meals, and
burial insurance to their participants but did not tell them what the
study's subject was (4-5). The study has continued to raise ethical
questions from its initial public exposure in July 1972 to this day, the
most prominent among which is the possibility that the disease could
have been treated with penicillin in the 1940s (8-9). Public reactions
to the news of the study ranged from disbelief to anger to accusations
of racism and even Nazism (11-12). Robert Morales notes in an appendix
to Truth that President Clinton issued an official apology for the
Tuskegee experiments in 1997.

(6) Paul Gilroy points out, for instance, that such factors as
"the lack of religious unity among new world blacks,"
contrasting narratives of slavery experience, and the sense that blacks
do not possess a unifying cultural ancestor pose obstacles to the goal
of genuine solidarity with members of the Jewish diaspora (1993, 212).
Michael Rogin also suggests that "by the early postwar period,
American Jews had achieved a position still denied today to American
blacks": they gained public success and cultural authority, in part
as compensation for the horrors of the Holocaust, even as blacks
continued to experience the entrenched racism and discrimination
inspired by centuries of slavery (1996, 262). The cultural assimilation
that many Jewish Americans have enjoyed also may not exist as an option
for economically disadvantaged African Americans (Goffinan 2000, 223).
Emily Miller Budick identifies "a competition between blacks and
Jews for authority in American culture" that further complicates
pre-existing tensions between black and white racial identities (1998,
11); ongoing struggles to establish slavery and the Holocaust as
universally acknowledged horrors, each identified with a unique set of
cultural factors, signifies that "the memorialization of trauma may
become a site of contestation" (Goffman 2000, 2).

Works Cited

Baigell, Matthew. 1974. The American Scene:American Painting of the
1930s. New York: Praeger.

Wright, Bradford W. 2001. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of
Youth Culture in America. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Jennifer Ryan is associate professor of English at Buffalo State
College. She is the author of Post-Jazz Poetics: A Social History
(2010). Her articles have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies and The
Geographical Imagination of Annie Proulx.